This Black History Month we've decided to dig into memoirs that explore the African-American experience. But we wanted to start off with talking with three distinguished writers and scholars who have either Lipliner Pencil Packaging a memoir or studied memoir to talk about what role memoir plays in the African-American experience.

And what we have in the contemporary era I think, is as black lives - more kinds of black lives - has made their way into the mainstream imagination, I think therefore more people - and I'm thinking Condoleezza Rice, do we talk about that as a literary memoir? Well, she came out with two books at about the same time and the one that she wrote that was more about the Birmingham of her childhood, more about her coming of age is a book that we read because she's someone who's name we know and we think that we're going to get to go behind the veil to use - to use DuBois' wonderful phrase.

So I think more black lives are publicly known now and so maybe that's why more black lives are making it into autobiographical form, even if these aren't the folks that we would necessarily think of as writers.Well, you know, that brings me back to - I'll just call him memoirist-in-chief, President Barack Obama...

A Story of Race and Inheritance" as something he wrote as he was preparing to run for president. But that's actually not true. He was initially offered the contract to chronicle being elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. So he wrote that right after law school so, or he started. And we happen to have a narration of him reading the book...